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EJToday: Top Headlines

EJToday is SEJ's selection of new and outstanding stories on environmental topics in print and on the air, updated every weekday. SEJ also offers a free e-mailed digest of the day's EJToday postings, called SEJ-beat. SEJ members are subscribed automatically, but may opt out here. Non-members may subscribe here. EJToday is also available via RSS feed. Please see Editorial Guidelines for EJToday content.

"For more than a decade, Coca-Cola, Pepsi and other beverage companies have fought mightily against efforts to tax sugary sodas, defeating more than three dozen such proposals around the country. But this month, voters in San Francisco, Oakland and Albany, Calif., as well as Boulder, Colo., stunned the industry by approving ballot measures in favor of soda taxes."

"MIAMI — Real estate agents looking to sell coastal properties usually focus on one thing: how close the home is to the water’s edge. But buyers are increasingly asking instead how far back it is from the waterline. How many feet above sea level? Is it fortified against storm surges? Does it have emergency power and sump pumps?"

"The Obama administration signed its final plan for renewable fuel use in the United States last week, leaving an oil industry reeling from the most aggressive biofuel targets yet as President-elect Donald Trump takes over. ... The policy was designed to cut greenhouse gas emissions ....It has pitted two of Trump's support bases against each other: Big Oil and Big Corn."

"Recent discoveries of illegal, unreported oil discharges and systematic dumping of chemicals from rigs and platforms have raised new fears about environmental damage in the Gulf of Mexico, more than six years after the worst oil spill in U.S. history."

"A small island in American Samoa is making the switch from diesel generators to 100 percent renewable energy. Ta’u, the easternmost of the Samoan islands, has just been equipped with a new microgrid with 1.4 megawatts of solar-generation capacity and six megawatt hours of battery storage. It’s enough to power the entire island night and day. "

"President-elect Donald Trump sold off his shares of Energy Transfer Partners, the owner of the $3.7 billion Dakota Access pipeline that has become the focus of protests by Native American and environmental groups, according to his spokeswoman Hope Hicks."

"When I first saw New York Times reporters tweet the news that Donald Trump claimed in an interview to have an “open mind” about climate change and the Paris climate agreement, I thought, Who cares? He is packing his administration with fossil fuel promoters, so his latest comments just suggest that he’s camouflaging his climate denial with doublespeak and pandering."

"Recovering from transplant surgery, Dan Greulich fell prey to a drug-resistant infection. What happened over the next five months shows the terrible human and financial price of an epidemic raging through the U.S. healthcare system."